This article explores the relational and motivational leadership behaviors that may promote stewardship in organizations. I conceptualize stewardship as an outcome of leadership behaviors that promote a sense of personal responsibility in followers for the long-term wellbeing of the organization and society. Building upon the themes presented in the stewardship literature, such as identification and intrinsic motivation, and drawing from other research streams to include factors such as interpersonal and institutional trust and moral courage, I posit that leaders foster stewardship (...) in their followers through various relational, motivational, and contextually supportive leadership behaviors. (shrink)

In this article, we demonstrate that individuals use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their self-serving behavior is justified, which in turn affects the distribution of resources in business situations. Specifically, we explore how ambiguous contextual cues and individual beliefs can jointly form motivated reasoning. Across two experimental studies, we find that whereas individual ideologies that endorse status hierarchies can strengthen the relationship between contextual ambiguity and motivated reasoning, individual beliefs rooted in fairness and equality can weaken it. Our findings (...) contribute to person–situation theories of business ethics and provide evidence that two ubiquitous factors in business organizations—contextual ambiguity and social dominance orientation—give rise to motivated reasoning, enabling decision makers to engage in self-serving distributions of resources. (shrink)

A paradigm shift in public health and medicine has broadened the field from a singular focus on the ill effects of negative states and psychopathology to an expanded view that examines protective psychological assets that may promote improved physical health and longevity. We summarize recent evidence of the link between psychological well-being and physical health, with particular attention to outcomes of mortality and chronic disease incidence and progression. Within this evolving discipline there remain controversies and lessons to be learned. We (...) discuss measurement-related challenges, concerns about the quality of the evidence, and other shortcomings in the field, along with a brief discussion of hypothesized biobehavioral mechanisms involved. Finally, we suggest next steps to move the field forward. (shrink)

This reply addresses observations of Drs. Larsen, Kruse, and Sweeny, and Scherer in their reviews of our published work on the link between positive psychological assets and outcomes of physical health. Inspired by Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative we argue that the interplay between the emotion spectrum and health is likely a complex and heterogeneous amalgam of known and yet unidentified elements melding at the individual level. When exploring the emotion–health link, researchers are challenged to grapple with complex system models by (...) considering multiple hierarchies of information that span individual-level factors, genetic blueprints, and cultural and environmental context. Research is needed to more fully elucidate the mechanism through which emotion influences health, with careful consideration of differences across race/ethnicity, culture, and context. (shrink)

Since the 2004 publication of his book The Good in the Right, Robert Audi has been at the forefront of the current resurgence of interest in intuitionism – the idea that human beings have an intuitive sense of right and wrong – in ethics. The New Intuitionism brings together some of the world’s most important contemporary writers from such diverse fields as metaethics, epistemology and moral psychology to explore the latest implications of, and challenges to, Audi’s work. The book also (...) includes an opening chapter that surveys the development of contemporary intuitionism and a conclusion that lays the ground for future developments and debates both written by Audi himself, making this an essential survey of this important school of ethical thought for anyone working in the field. (shrink)

Humans and AI systems are usually portrayed as separate sys- tems that we need to align in values and goals. However, there is a great deal of AI technology found in non-autonomous systems that are used as cognitive tools by humans. Under the extended mind thesis, the functional contributions of these tools become as essential to our cognition as our brains. But AI can take cognitive extension towards totally new capabil- ities, posing new philosophical, ethical and technical chal- lenges. To (...) analyse these challenges better, we define and place AI extenders in a continuum between fully-externalized systems, loosely coupled with humans, and fully-internalized processes, with operations ultimately performed by the brain, making the tool redundant. We dissect the landscape of cog- nitive capabilities that can foreseeably be extended by AI and examine their ethical implications. We suggest that cognitive extenders using AI be treated as distinct from other cognitive enhancers by all relevant stakeholders, including developers, policy makers, and human users. (shrink)

The authors of Beziau and Franceschetto work with logics that have the property of not satisfying any of the formulations of the principle of non contradiction, Béziau and Franceschetto also analyze, among the three-valued logics, which of these logics satisfy this property. They prove that there exist only four of such logics, but only two of them are worthwhile to study. The language of these logics does not consider implication as a connective. However, the enrichment of a language with an (...) implication connective leads us to more interesting systems, therefore we look for one implication for these logics and we study further properties that the logics obtain when this connective is added to these systems. (shrink)

The notion of conceptual space, proposed by Gärdenfors as a framework for the representation of concepts and knowledge, has been highly influential over the last decade or so. One of the main theses involved in this approach is that the conceptual regions associated with properties, concepts, verbs, etc. are convex. The aim of this paper is to show that such a constraint—that of the convexity of the geometry of conceptual regions—is problematic; both from a theoretical perspective and with regard to (...) the inner workings of the theory itself. On the one hand, all the arguments provided in favor of the convexity of conceptual regions rest on controversial assumptions. Additionally, his argument in support of a Euclidean metric, based on the integral character of conceptual dimensions, is weak, and under non-Euclidean metrics the structure of regions may be non-convex. Furthermore, even if the metric were Euclidean, the convexity constraint could be not satisfied if concepts were differentially weighted. On the other hand, Gärdenfors’ convexity constraint is brought into question by the own inner workings of conceptual spaces because: some of the allegedly convex properties of concepts are not convex; the conceptual regions resulting from the combination of convex properties can be non-convex; convex regions may co-vary in non-convex ways; and his definition of verbs is incompatible with a definition of properties in terms of convex regions. Therefore, the mandatory character of the convexity requirement for regions in a conceptual space theory should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that female leaders lead slightly more effective than male leaders. However, women are still underrepresented in higher management. In this study, we seek to contribute to a deeper understanding of this paradox by proposing and testing an innovative model that integrates different research streams on gender and leadership. Specifically, we propose power motivation and transformational leadership as two central yet opposing dynamics that underlie the relation between gender and leadership role occupancy. We tested this model in (...) a sample of 256 employees. Results provided support for the proposed relations. These findings contribute to a more detailed and comprehensive understanding for central dynamics that link gender and leadership role occupancy. Moreover, they provide important insights for interventions that are targeted at reducing the gender gap in leadership. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between cooperative business relations in small businesses and environmental protection, one of the most important policies of social responsibility in manufacturing. We reviewed the literature and carried out an empirical study of 930 small manufacturing firms in Spain. Results indicate that small businesses that maintain and improve their cooperative relations through business networking with universities, competitors, suppliers and customers spend more on environmental protection. The managerial, practical, research and policy implications of the obtained research findings (...) are discussed. (shrink)

The main factor of intelligence is defined as the ability tocomprehend, formalising this ability with the help of new constructsbased on descriptional complexity. The result is a comprehension test,or C- test, which is exclusively defined in computational terms. Due toits absolute and non-anthropomorphic character, it is equally applicableto both humans and non-humans. Moreover, it correlates with classicalpsychometric tests, thus establishing the first firm connection betweeninformation theoretical notions and traditional IQ tests. The TuringTest is compared with the C- test and the (...) combination of the two isquestioned. In consequence, the idea of using the Turing Test as apractical test of intelligence should be surpassed, and substituted bycomputational and factorial tests of different cognitive abilities, amuch more useful approach for artificial intelligence progress and formany other intriguing questions that present themselves beyond theTuring Test. (shrink)

This paper presents two formation tracking control strategies for a combined set of single and double integrator agents with an arbitrary undirected communication topology. The first approach is based on the design of distance-based potential functions with interagent collision avoidance using local information about the distance and orientation between agents and the desired trajectory. The second approach adds signed area constraints to the desired formation specification and a control strategy that uses distance as well as area terms is designed to (...) achieve tracking convergence. Numerical simulations show the performance from both control laws. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo me propongo realizar una exposición general del concepto metafísico del Ometeotl de la filosofía náhuatl a partir del problema metafísico del acceso a la realidad. Sostendré que la metafísica náhuatl no es inmanente, ni trascendente, sino trascendental. Además, es panenteísta, henoteísta y existencial. Por último, en un ejercicio comparativo con algunas teorías metafísicas occidentales y no occidentales realizaré algunos paralelos para mostrar similitudes entre estás como sugerencia para posibles trabajos posteriores.

A partir de la duplicidad del aparecer, principio básico de la fenomenología radical elaborada por Michel Henry en continuidad y ruptura con el proyecto husserliano, se pueden plantear ciertas notas para una antropología filosófica. Esta fenomenología propone la vida como fenómeno originario y, al definirla como autoafección, postula la necesidad de reconocer en ella, por principio, la presencia de una ipseidad, de modo que no hay vida sin viviente ni viviente sin vida. Determinar cuáles sean las notas que definen la (...) condición de dicho viviente sería la tarea de la antropología fenomenológica correspondiente. En atención a la enunciada duplicidad, dicho viviente —que es el hombre— ha de ser comprendido como pasividad radical respecto de la vida y como actividad constituyente respecto del mundo. (shrink)

Bernard Williams? integrity objection poses a significant challenge to utilitarianism, which has largely been answered by utilitarians. This paper recasts the integrity objection to show that utilitarian agents could be committed to producing the overall best states of affairs and yet not positively act to bring them about. I introduce the ?Moral Pinch Hitter? ? someone who performs actions at the bequest of another agent ? to demonstrate that utilitarianism cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent maximizes utility by (...) positively acting in response to her duty, and cases in which an agent fails morally by relying upon someone else to perform the obligatory act. The inability to distinguish among these cases establishes a new, reloaded integrity objection to utilitarianism: utilitarianism cannot explain why it would be wrong to have someone else make difficult moral decisions, and to act on those decisions, for me. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo analizaremos algunos de los principales elementos de la propuesta ontológico-fenomenológica que Sartre expone en El ser y la nada, relacionándolos con algunos referentes clave. Al aclarar los vínculos de esta propuesta con la tradición filosófica previa sobre el tema del ser, su papel en la existencia, el carácter de la realidad y su relación con el fenómeno se demuestra cuál es el verdadero aporte de Sartre en esta materia.

There is convergence among researchers of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits taxonomy, that the dimension of conscientiousness best explains differences in work performance. This research is a literature review on the interrelationship between certain traits of the conscientiousness dimension and human virtues, or character traits. It also analyzes whether or not it is rational to argue that the continuous improvement culture enhances the exercise of these character traits. The personal effort to develop one's conscientiousness enriches one's character or way of (...) being, and this development is a consequence of character moulding through an intellectual and willful effort enabling one not only to develop personal habits but also to improve task performance. Continuous improvement culture, on the one hand, should provide a work environment where employees can practice virtues, including those contained in conscientiousness. On the other hand, the requirement is that continuous improvement culture should be developed in an environment that respects the freedom and purpose of the individual. (shrink)

Samuel Kerstein argues that an asymmetry between moral worth and maxims prevents Kant from accepting a category of acts that are impermissible, but have moral worth. Kerstein contends that an act performed from the motive of duty should be considered as a candidate for moral worth, even if the action's maxim turns out to be impermissible, since moral worth depends on the correct moral motivation of an act, rather than on the moral lightness of an act. I argue that Kant (...) cannot consistently maintain that there are morally forbidden, though good, acts since one of the conditions of acting from the moral law should be that one has a true belief about what the moral law requires. My project, then, rejects the possibility of morally impermissible, worthy acts for Kant, and qualifies the conditions for moral worth Kerstein gives with an epistemological constraint on moral worth. (shrink)

Resumen El propósito de este trabajo es profundizar en el concepto de actividad de imagen y defender su utilidad como categoría de estudio para comprender diferentes tipos de comportamiento que afectan a la imagen social de los hablantes en la interacción comunicativa: cortesía, descortesía y actividad de autoimagen. Teniendo como base estudios sociopragmáticos del español desde una perspectiva cultural y estudios teóricos en inglés de la última década, se tratará el concepto de actividad de imagen, el cual se caracteriza de (...) acuerdo con dos conceptos claves: el del efecto social que un comportamiento comunicativo tiene sobre las imágenes de los hablantes y el del continuo social, la conexión que se establece entre sus imágenes en la interacción. De esta forma, se propone tratar la actividad de imagen desde dos perspectivas relacionadas: la de la dirección seguida por el efecto social hacia los interactuantes y la de las características de este efecto, siendo su interrelación el factor que permite identificar y caracterizar el tipo de actividad de imagen. (shrink)

In case of special engineering projects of important relevance it is interesting to pay attention to several possible risks; some of them are in the field of morality or ethics. Due to the social importance of these risks, additional considerations or even additional warranties are justified.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Leibniz’s form/matter defense of omnipotence is paradoxical, but not irretrievably so. Leibniz maintains that God necessarily must concur only in the possibility for evil’s existence in the world (the form of evil), but there are individual instances of moral evil that are not necessary (the matter of evil) with which God need not concur. For Leibniz, that there is moral evil in the world is contingent on God’s will (a dimension of (...) divine omnipotence), with the result that even though it is necessary that God exerts his will, there are particular products of his will that are contingent and unnecessary—including human moral evil. If there are instances of evil which are contingent on God’s will and yet unnecessary, then the problematic conclusion for Leibniz’s view must be that human evil depends upon divine concurrence, not just for its possibility in the world (which is necessary) but for its instance (which is contingent). If the form/matter defense of omnipotence contains a true paradox, then God concurs in the form as well as the matter of evil. To assuage this difficulty for Leibniz, I will argue that he could either give up an Augustinian notion of evil, or rely upon a distinction between *potenta absoluta* and *potenta ordinate*, which was popular among important thinkers in the medieval period. (shrink)

En este trabajo se analiza el debate sobre los pobres en la España del siglo XVI, a raíz de la prohibición de la mendicidad; en concreto, la controversia que originaron Domingo de Soto y Juan de Robles en 1545. Se establecen también, analogías entre dos sociedades -la del siglo XVI y la de la actualidad- en torno a dos ideas: la asistencia que se debe otorgar a los desfavorecidos, analizando si esa ayuda, sea privada o estatal, coopera o colabora a (...) su descrédito social, y una segunda que es la idea del destino universal de los bienes y del uso de lo común en ambas sociedades. (shrink)

Quoting Flaubert through time, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Madame B brings Madame Bovary’s reflections on love and emotions to the present day, in a productive anachronism. Their work produces an intertemporal space where the past is relevant for the present, and the present enables us to understand the past. Intimacy and routine are central in their exploration of Flaubert’s contemporaneity. Those issues are precisely one of the keys in Karl Ove Knausgård’s project of literary autobiography, where he expands (...) narration foreclosing the ellipsis and giving visibility to small things and emotions; a project with some resonances with Munch’s crude-obscene uses of intimacy. This essay explores how both proposals, Bal and Williams Gamaker in film, and Knausgård in literature, can serve us to connect present and past sensibilities and, more than that, demonstrate resistances to the hegemonic discourses of temporality. (shrink)

Animals, including humans, are usually judged on what they could become, rather than what they are. Many physical and cognitive abilities in the ‘animal kingdom’ are only acquired (to a given degree) when the subject reaches a certain stage of development, which can be accelerated or spoilt depending on how the environment, training or education is. The term ‘potential ability’ usually refers to how quick and likely the process of attaining the ability is. In principle, things should not be different (...) for the ‘machine kingdom’. While machines can be characterised by a set of cognitive abilities, and measuring them is already a big challenge, known as ‘universal psychometrics’, a more informative, and yet more challenging, goal would be to also determine the potential cognitive abilities of a machine. In this paper we investigate the notion of potential cognitive ability for machines, focussing especially on universality and intelligence. We consider several machine characterisations (non-interactive and interactive) and give definitions for each case, considering permanent and temporal potentials. From these definitions, we analyse the relation between some potential abilities, we bring out the dependency on the environment distribution and we suggest some ideas about how potential abilities can be measured. Finally, we also analyse the potential of environments at different levels and briefly discuss whether machines should be designed to be intelligent or potentially intelligent. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the problem of evil and a kenotic view of the Atonement evidenced not just by feminist theologians, but by analytic philosophers of religion. I will argue that, although kenosis provides an interesting story about the ability of Christ to partake in human suffering, it faces debilitating problems for understanding divine concurrence with evil in the world. Most significantly, I will argue that the potential tensions between divine justice and divine love can be loosened by (...) looking at ‘redemptive accounts’ of theodicy in the scholarship of women writing in the early modern period in philosophy, particularly Mary Hays , and Catharine Macaulay . Their work collectively confirms the problem of concrete evil and yet offers a unique theodicy grounded in the saving power of the Atonement and restorative power of Christian service. Their arguments are all the more compelling for having been written in response to egregious civil rights abuses and rampant domestic violence of their day. If the Atonement is the divinely-ordained method for gaining insight into the redemptive power of divine grace, then rather than speculating about the metaphysical nature of the divine, this paper will question how we can understand divine perfection in light of evil in the world, especially if the Atonement of Christ involves kenosis. (shrink)

Every so often an experiment trying to give reliable evidence for a metallic hydrogen solid is reported. Such evidence is, however, not too convincing. As Eric Scerri has recently reiterated, “the jury is still out on that issue” . This search stems from the common spectroscopy shared by the hydrogen atom and all the alkali metal atoms, and perhaps is guided by a desire to place hydrogen atop the alkali metals, in Mendeleiev’s Table, reinforced by the fact pointed out by (...) Scerri that there is no other obvious place for hydrogen in said Table. But H2 is a light gas at room temperature, while Li, Na, K and the other alkali elements form solid metal crystals. At very low temperatures, of course, hydrogen solidifies, but it is formed by H2 molecules . Our purpose here is to use a new argument to break this impasse: “should H be grouped with the alkali metals with which it shares a common spectroscopy, but which solidifies in a completely different fashion?” This argument has been proposed before in a couple of papers in this journal to establish a similar question for He and the alkaline earths , as is discussed in “Precedents” section. (shrink)

Background: The Directive 2001/20/EC was an important first step towards consistency in the requirements and processes for clinical trials across Europe. However, by applying the same rules to all types of drug trials and transposing the Directive’s principles into pre-existing national legislations, the Directive somewhat failed to meet its facilitation and harmonisation targets. In the field of ethics, the Directive 2001/20/EC conditioned the way of understanding and transposing the “single opinion” process in each country. This led to a situation in (...) which two models of research ethics committees organisation systems exist, being the model in which the “single opinion” is considered to be the decision made by a single ethics committee more effective and simpler in terms of administrative and logistic workload. Method: A survey was conducted in 10 European countries. Members of the European Clinical Research Infrastructures Network working party number 1, with expertise in the field of ethics, responded. Results: There is a major heterogeneity in the composition of ethics committees among the surveyed countries based on the number of members, proportion of experts versus lay members and expertise of the scientific members. A harmonised education of the ethics committees’ membership based in common curricula is recommended by the majority of countries. Conclusions: Despite the efforts for harmonisation of the European Clinical Trial Directive, from an ethical point of view, there remains a plurality of ethics committees' systems in Europe. It is important to comprehend the individual national systems to understand the problems they are facing. (shrink)

A completely Lorentz-invariant Bohmian model has been proposed recently for the case of a system of non-interacting spinless particles, obeying Klein-Gordon equations. It is based on a multi-temporal formalism and on the idea of treating the squared norm of the wave function as a space-time probability density. The particle’s configurations evolve in space-time in terms of a parameter σ with dimensions of time. In this work this model is further analyzed and extended to the case of an interaction with an (...) external electromagnetic field. The physical meaning of σ is explored. Two special situations are studied in depth: (1) the classical limit, where the Einsteinian Mechanics of Special Relativity is recovered and the parameter σ is shown to tend to the particle’s proper time; and (2) the non-relativistic limit, where it is obtained a model very similar to the usual non-relativistic Bohmian Mechanics but with the time of the frame of reference replaced by σ as the dynamical temporal parameter. (shrink)

Although the proportion of women in leadership positions has grown over the past decades, women are still underrepresented in leadership roles, which poses an ethical challenge to society at large but business in particular. Accordingly, a growing body of research has attempted to unravel the reasons for this inequality. Besides theoretical progress, a central goal of these studies is to inform measures targeted at increasing the share of women in leadership positions. Striving to contribute to these efforts and drawing on (...) several theoretical approaches, the present study provides a contemporary examination of whether women and men differ in their levels of power motivation and whether potential gender differences in this motivation contribute to the unequal distribution of women and men in leadership positions. Results from four studies provide converging support for these assumptions. Specifically, we found that women consistently reported lower power motivation than men. This in turn mediated the link between gender and leadership role occupancy. These results were robust to several methodological variations including samples from different populations, diverse operationalizations of power motivation and leadership role occupancy, and study design. Implications for theory and practice, including ways to contribute to a more equal gender distribution in leadership positions, are discussed. (shrink)